The findings regarding the inexplicably complex brass mechanism in a wrecked Roman ship have shown it to be a special purpose mechanica computer more advanced than anything most would have imagined being produced in 150 BC.

This is fascinating. Which is funny, considering I got dragged kicking and screaming through the watered down calculus they offer people who aren’t math majors. Of course, that was partly a matter of it being mandated for my major, and partly my not seeing how it was necessary. On the other hand, in high school I almost got moved retroactively into the advanced math program because I was a geometry star in 10th grade. I tend to need to grok some of the principles before I can go on, and if I am disinterested, I won’t work at the nuts and bolts.

I recently taught my nine year old daughter what prime numbers are. She’s in third grade, being introduced to multiplication, except I introduced her to that long ago. She has become more interested in math at school, now that it’s gotten to that, except she’s already toying with division, and at home she and the younger two play with negative numbers and square roots.

What’s particularly interesting here, beside that I did not know there was a concept called twin primes, is that this touches on concepts in addition, that most basic of functions. I love that the solution is by a complete unknown, confusing the establishment by coming out of nowhere.

NSA spying goes so far as to intercept packages to plant backdoors or other monitoring methods. It’s not enough to be offline, or to be on darknet, or to be on an alternative to the Internet. All unconstitutional, depending on how judges rule, which for all we know could depend on what they have on the judges in question, shades of the speculation regarding the Roberrts contortions on ObamaCare. And that speculation preceded the NSA revelations, and even the IRS scandal. But I digress into the non-technical, non-geek realm, if not into one that should concern us all.

What gets me is trying to picture how they do the physical interception. You order from, say, Dell, who ships it, say, UPS, then somewhere in transit to you the package is intercepted? Whatever is going to done to it happens, then it is inserted back into transit? Without the shipper knowing? Hard to imagine.

That programmers have to do. A decent listing. Most people have no idea. It’s especially bad when you can whip together a basic interface that demonstrates what an app can look like and, to some degree even if by faking it, what it can do, and people then take that as an indicator of how little time creating the full thing should take.